Doubtless we may regard it as highly probable that this ceremony represents a borrowing on the part of animal totemism from plant totemism. For the hunter, similarly, desires that there be a very great abundance of game animals. Yet it is mainly plants that are the object of concern--a concern caused by the changes in weather, with its incalculable oscillations between life-bringing rain and the withering glare of the sun. These are the motives that find expression in the festivals designed for the multiplication of the totems, the 'Intichiuma' festivals. The motives to these ancient cults still frequently find their counterparts in the customs of the cultural peoples of the present. When, in times of a long drought, processions pass over the fields and supplicate Heaven for rain, as occurs even to-day in some regions, we certainly have an analogous phenomenon. The only difference is that the Australian tribes invoke their totems instead of Heaven; they call upon the plants which are to increase and upon the animals which are to be available for hunting, with the aim of thus exercising a magical influence upon them. In connection with the Australian ceremonies designed to multiply the food plants and game animals, we come upon still a _third_ kind of totem objects. They differ from those of the two preceding classes in that they are not regarded as independent totems, but merely as vehicles of the same sort of magical power as is possessed by animal and plant totems. In distinction from the latter, we may briefly call them _inanimate totems_. They consist of stones and sticks. These are utilized as magical objects in the Australian Intichiuma festivals, and also, under the above-mentioned name of 'churingas,' in connection with conception totemism. They differ from animate totems in that the latter are in themselves endowed with magical properties, whereas the former are always held to derive these powers from living magicians, from the anthropomorphic or zoömorphic ancestors of antiquity. These magicians are thought to have transmitted the objects to later generations for the use of the latter in the practice of magic. Thus, the churingas have a peculiar status, intermediate between magical beings and magical implements. They are carefully preserved because--as is indicated by their use in connection with conception totemism--they are regarded as legacies left by ancestors; moreover, they are also supposed to harbour the demoniacal power of these ancestors. One of the factors determining the selection of these objects is doubtless generally their shape, which is frequently of a striking nature, such as to arouse astonishment. Ejected into the object itself, this astonishment becomes a wonder-working power. Later, the desire to secure such magical means of aid may become a supplementary factor in the selection of these objects, and, as widespread phenomena of a similar nature show, may